Music on NAS with iTunes server. How to sync iPhone?

Question

Music on NAS with iTunes server. How to sync iPhone?

I keep my music collection on a synology NAS, which has a built-in iTunes server. I can see it fine on the mac that I use to sync my iPhone by selecting it in the pull-down in the upper left, but when I sync my iPhone none of the music shows up. My understanding is that home sharing won't work, because the music must be on the local machine to sync a device. I suppose that I could ignore the server and import all the music onto the mac (without copying), but that would mean that I need to "manually" update this particular mac any time music is added or deleted from the library - an error-prone hassle, unless there's some sort of auto-update that I don't know about

Is there a clean way to do this?

Posted on Jul 12, 2016 10:42 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 12, 2016 11:13 AM in response to Jerry Fiddler

I haven't seen posts by about sync problems by other people using a NAS with iTunes. It doesn't have to be local. You may have some issue completely unrelated such as subscribing to Apple Music in which case manual syncing is not possible, everything is done through iCloud.

Now plenty of other problems with using a NAS? Most definitely I have seen posts.

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Answer 2

Jul 12, 2016 11:28 AM in response to Limnos

I thinnk that the problem isn't that the music is on a NAS, but that I'm sharing it via the NAS server rather than adding it to the computers local library (even if the file itself is on the NAS). The problem with adding it is that I'd need to constantly be updating it to keep it in sync with file that are added on the NAS, which I'd like to avoid.

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Answer 3

Jul 12, 2016 11:55 AM in response to Jerry Fiddler

The music has to be added to the library. This creates an entry for it in the iTunes Library.itl database which is what iTunes uses for recognizing media in its collection. Media does not have to be physically present on the computer.

You can add music to iTunes without it actually putting the file on the computer but maybe you already know that (and I don't have to type in instructions 🙂 ). You can also have it so when you add music to iTunes the copy iTunes uses is automatically placed on external storage.

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